Busy day

Man! Today ended up being a not so lazy Sunday for us. It did at least start out slow. But then we went to Eddie and Carla's house and had him cut Eli's hair and Kayla hung out with her friend Janae there. We also got the opportunity to visit with Rosie, who is the lady that babysat Kayla and Eli for 6 yrs! She unfortunately broke her back a few weeks ago so she is staying with them (he is her son). Her first comment when she saw Hailey was "She looks just like Eli"! No surprise there! The girl does look just like her brother! Anyways, Kayla stayed at their house to hang out for a bit. In the meantime, we went to lunch.

After lunch we came home and put Emma down for a nap. She only got to sleep for about an hour before we had to wake her up so that we could go pick Kayla up. We then had to go pick up her friend Kadejah so she could borrow our computer and printer to do her homework. While the girls were working, JR and Eli were grocery shopping. Then we had to take Kadejah back home so we could get home and finish up cooking dinner (pot of beans) and actually eat it! After all was said and done, I didn't actually get to sit and relax until about 9:45! Phew! I think we were all worn out and ready for bed! :)

Cereal

The Dr. gave us the go ahead to start feeding Hailey solids. So, as usual, we started with rice cereal. She doesn't get super excited about it but she seems to know what to do with it because very little ends up getting pushed back out of her mouth. Soon we will get to add the fun foods aka yellow/orange veggies. Those are the ones that my kids always loved!

NaBloPoMo Day 7

So is it bad that I am already pooping out on this plan?! Of course it is Friday and this is my tired day. It's the end of the work week. The week wears me out. I do good to stay awake past 9! So maybe that is why this is the best I am going to give you today! I hope I can be a bit more creative and/or inspired tomorrow. :)

Helmets and snowsuits

The guy across the street from us is in the process of doing a huge move and selling a ton of stuff in a garage sale. Yes people, it was that warm around here. There were garage sales happening last weekend! Anyways, he is a motorcyclist and must have had a spare helmet or two. Eli spent the entire weekend helping them with their garage sale and periodically came home with things they had given him. One of the things was a helmet. I walked into the living room to find him watching TV like this.......
And this is Hailey in her new winter coat/suit. I love putting babies in these things because they just look so darn cute in them! After I put it on her she kind of gave me this look like I was crazy for doing that to her.

It's a real life deer!

Yesterday after I picked Eli up and we headed to go get the girls, we took a slight detour down the street one block west of us. We saw a lady with a camera in her hand so naturally we had to look around to see if we could figure out what she was looking at. It was a deer! The poor thing must have wandered away from the bluffs that are about a half mile east of us or the bluffs that are a half mile north of us! But the best part was Eli's reaction. He says "It's a real live deer!". It is a rare siting smack in the middle of the city! Typically the closest we get to any sort of wildlife in this particular neighborhood is a fox! Unfortunately we didn't get to stick around to see where the deer went since we had to get Kayla from school. I do hope it got out of the neighborhood and back to where it was safe. Either direction towards the bluffs were picking up traffic because of rush hour!

And on to the big girl bed

We have figured out in Emma's short little life that she is one of those people that will do the job....once she is darn good and ready to do it. She won't warn you, tell you that she is ready to do the job. She will just do it. I decided this weekend that we needed to push this issue of getting Emma out of her crib because Hailey shouldn't be in her bassinet anymore because she is a chunky monkey. So the crib came down on Saturday. I let her take part. Though she wasn't really interested. But she did hang out in her room while Kayla and I took it all down. Saturday night, the girl cried for close to an hour. JR asked at one point how long I thought it would take her to figure out she could get out of the bed. But she never did! The girl stayed in her bed and cried. She fell asleep, and stayed that way until early Sunday morning (thank you stupid daylight savings time for coming to an end!) when she did get out of bed on her own. Sunday night, she went to bed just fine and did fine last night. When she wakes up in the morning, if you ask her where her crib is, she tells you it went bye-bye. We will leave it down for at least a month and let Hailey sleep in her pack-n-play. We haven't actually put Hailey in their room yet just to make sure Emma will continue to do good every night.

Potty training take 2

For the last week we have been working on potty training Emma again. And it has worked much better this time around! She obviously just wasn't ready a few months ago when we tried. She has done awesome! She did have a rough day on Fri and Sat but came out of that beautifully Sun and today. We do still put her in a diaper if we are leaving the house and for bedtime at night. She won't let us put one on her for her nap time though. Which is fine. She is really embracing the potty training and I think she likes being a big girl now! Yay Emma!

Leaves!

Today was yet another gorgeous day here in beautiful Colorado! According to my computer the high was 72. Remember, this is Nov 2nd! The only way you can even tell it's fall around here is because the yards and now streets are starting to fill up with leaves. So the kids decided to make the most of it and went outside to play in the leaves. I swear this is the only time of year you will find kids everywhere WILLING to do some yard work! The kids would rake the leaves into a pile and then jump into them or throw them at each other. I think I will be picking leaves out of Emma's hair days! And you should have seen the tub at bath time! I don't know where she was hiding them!

Kayla jumping in

Emma "jumping" in. She is a little too short to jump so it was more like a run.

Eli jumping in. I LOVE this picture. It shows his care-free nature and the smile on his face is priceless.

Eli, Cassidy (lives next door), Kailey (lives across the street and I'm not entirely sure I spelled her name right!), Emma, Kayla and Hailey. The were taking a candy break here!

While this nice weather was good for Halloween and this whole weekend....enough already! We need snow!

NaBloPoMo

So last year a fellow blogger friend of mine Crystal participated in Na(tional) Blo(g) Po(sting) Mo(nth) and I was interested in it, but not quite ready to play along. This year, I am going to do it! For the entire month of November, I have to do a post a day. This shouldn't be a problem considering I am now a family of 6! And yeah, I am using this one as my first post for Nov. But I know I have other stuff to post for tomorrow! :)

Anyone else wanna play along?

Happy Halloween!

So despite the fact that I live in Colorado, have lived in Colorado for almost 31 yrs now (I was around 5 mo old when my family moved here) I just didn't feel like it was truly Halloween in Colorado. You see, Halloween to me always meant that it was either snowing, had been snowing or there was still ice on the ground from a snow fall a couple of days prior. Heck for years we would have had a snow fall by my birthday on the 18th! This year, we haven't even had a single snowflake hit the ground yet! Weird, very weird. As a matter of fact, it was so nice last night that JR and I only had to wear sweatshirts (matching I might add!) and the kids were fine without having to have layers on underneath the costumes! And typically, here in Colorado, we have to plan costumes for getting at least one warm layer under whatever you wear!

We usually trick-or-treat down our street and then one other street to the east of us. Don't know how we started going to the east except for maybe that you have to tackle a hill, albeit a small one, to go that direction and we didn't want to bother! Anyways, we obviously had Hailey in the stroller because I wasn't too interested in carrying her in the Bjorn. I debated on whether Emma should even participate since is only 2 and won't be eating most of the candy she gets. But I figured since she was able to say "trick-or-treat" and "thank you" that she could go ahead and do it. We started her out in her stroller but as soon as she got out at the first house, she didn't get back in! I think she walked about 3/4 of a mile once all was said and done! And we didn't even do both sides of the other street because it was so late! Of course, Kayla and Eli could have kept going. But every year we go to Nana's house so she can see the kids all dressed up.

Eli's costume from the front view.

And then the side view. That is a green glow stick in the jar to make it look like his head is in formaldehyde. However, it fell out a couple of houses down the street so it was in his candy bag the rest of the time.

Here are all 4 of them all dressed up and ready to start walking! Or riding! Kayla is dressed up as one of those High Voltage boxes, Eli is a man carrying his head in a jar, Emma is a dalmation and Hailey is Tigger.

This was some hard work for Hailey! She had to take a nap after a while!

All in all, it was a good night. Nice weather. Happy kids. Well until the end of the night and Emma was up past 8! JR did have to run back home halfway through to poke some more holes in Eli's costume because it was fogging up from him breathing!

She's a ch-ch-ch-chunky monkey!

Hailey had her 4 month well-baby check-up this morning. I was really curious to know how much she weighed since she is such a chunk! So her stats are:

Weight: 17lbs 4.6oz (99th percentile)

Height: 26-1/4" long (99th percentile)

That just confirmed what I thought! She is not just a chunk....she is a TALL chunk! And it confirmed the fact that I will be shorter than all 4 of my kids. Don't you think I would have had better odds? Nope!

As for the birth mark, the Dr. feels like it has grown very fast in a short amount of time. At first, he was just going to have us go to a plastic surgeon here in town. But then he decided that it would be better to take her to Children's Hospital in Denver. Get this....they have a dept called The Birth Mark Center! So that is where we will take her simply because they should really know their stuff since that is their specialty! Now I just have to pray our insurance doesn't change in a couple of months!

Update on Emma and the big girl bed

Desperate times call for desperate measures....

For the last several days, I have moved Emma while she is sleeping from the crib into her big girl bed. She does wake up when I move her, but for the most part she will just accept where she is and go right back to sleep. So her track record so far is from 10:30pm-5:00am the 1st night, refusal the 2nd night, from 12:00am(ish)-6:30am the 3rd night and then from 10:30-12:30 last night. The nice thing about her waking up at normal time that 3rd night was that I was the one to actually wake her up (as opposed to her waking on her own) and pump her full of praise for sleeping there. And then she gets to brag to everyone at home and then to Nana about her accomplishment.

Tonight, before she fell asleep, I removed the drop rail from the side of her crib and put her rail from the big girl bed on it. I mainly did this to see if she would even try to escape her crib. NOPE! The girl loves her bed! As I said before, I don't know how to deal with this because Kayla and Eli both couldn't wait to get out of their crib or bed! It also made it much easier on me to move her because I just slide one arm under her pillow and one under her knees and scoop and move! Not easy when working around a crib railing!

So she has been in her big girl bed for almost 2 hrs now! I'm hoping I only have a week or two of this before she finally decides to sleep in the bed for good. Poor Hailey is too big for her little bassinet!

I think it's safe to say that I get less sleep because of Emma than Hailey! Thank God Hailey sleeps through the night! Not sure what I would do if she didn't!